Florida Sen. Marco Rubio had great timing when he decided to run for re-election, as a news report Wednesday exposed how a likely opponent of his, Rep. Patrick Murphy, has (at the very least) inflated his business acumen.
Murphy has frequently touted his business career on the campaign trail. “I believe that my background as a CPA and a small business owner is exactly what we need to put our country back on track,” Murphy said when running for Congress in 2012.
A CBS4 investigative report, though, found that Murphy was neither a small business owner nor a practicing CPA. “Well, first of all when I graduated college I went to work at Deloitte & Touche, I got my CPA license and I spent years going to numerous Fortune 500 companies, looking for inefficiencies, waste and fraud,” Murphy has said when describing himself.
Murphy never had a CPA license in Florida, where he worked for Deloitte & Touche. Instead, after nine attempts, Murphy passed the Vermont CPA exam, which has less stringent requirements than Florida. Colorado then accepted the Vermont test results and Murphy got his CPA license on September 4, 2009.
Then, while at Deloitte & Touche, his job title was “audit assistant.”
According to Charles Lee, a business professor at Stanford University and a former senior manager at the Big Four accounting firm KPMG, “The entry level audit assistant is kind of like a gopher.” Lee added to CBS4, “He would be given a green pencil and told to check a series of numbers. That’s a very junior position.”
Murphy also didn’t spend “years,” as he describes, at Deloitte & Touche. He left the firm eight months after receiving his CPA license in May 2010.
The next portion of Murphy’s story has him as a small business owner cleaning up the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. He described his business, Coastal Environment, as “doing well” and having “several” clean-up contracts. CBS4’s review of Coastal Environment corporate documents found that Murphy wasn’t the owner of the business, that the business didn’t do well and that it didn’t have several contracts. In fact, it had no contracts.
Murphy’s father, Thomas, who has largely bankrolled his political career, was actually the owner of Coastal Environment, as it was a subsidiary of Thomas’ business, Coastal Construction. At Coastal Environment, Murphy was actually “vice president,” and the president of the company, Daniel Whiteman, was also vice chairman of Coastal Construction.
Murphy’s campaign provided CBS4 Coastal Environment finances to review, but they revealed little concrete information. It was a single page document with three lines: revenue, operating costs and operating profit. Jess Singer, a CPA certified in financial forensics said to CBS4, “It’s not a financial statement, it really doesn’t give you any picture of the financial health or operations of the company.”
Coastal Environment currently still owns oil skimmers in preparation for another oil disaster and has to pay to store them. The cost of storing the boats for the past five years is more than Coastal Environment claimed to make in profit in 2010.
On Wednesday afternoon, Murphy continued to tout his business experience.
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